HunterX is an action-adventure platformer published by ORANGE POPCORN. You as a teenage girl are fighting demons and other monsters with her sword. Let’s debate whether this game stands out in the crowd of platformers or if it’s a game to skip.
Usually I like to start my review with the story of the game. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to say about this. The game offers little to no explanation for the protagonist’s objectives. One night she finds a crack in the world and is hunting demons when more demons need to be hunted.HunterX begins one night with the protagonist already in the middle of a hunt. I don’t know why, I don’t know where we are or what this fictional world is called.
You are thrown into the gameplay with little explanation as to why you should care about this game. The first level is a kind of tutorial. The first level presents a button that explains the gameplay. I’ve always liked simple tutorials and learning by playing, so I’m glad HunterX is doing tutorials like this.
Gameplay is very simple. Your character can run, dash, and wield a sword. There is a tree of complex skills that can be upgraded using karma (found about the world and by defeating enemies). Karma is simply experience. However, skill trees aren’t as simple as gaining enough karma to level up a particular skill. Karma can then be used to upgrade these core skills. For example, you can dash, but upgrade at some point to allow your hero to dash in the air.
However, everything is arranged within levels. You encounter your core skills in the same way you encounter your karma. Nothing hidden or interactive. In HunterX, simply going through each level’s movements gets boring after a while.
Boss fights were unique enough. However, due to its high difficulty, it is almost impossible to defeat it in one hit. This is obviously not a bad thing, but I pick it up because of the somewhat sticky controls and save system.
For example, this isn’t a hack-and-slash game, despite what it looks like. I often hit the attack button on enemies and bosses and got into trouble. Instead of being hit after hit, the hero must hit several times and then reset if necessary before attacking again. It was slower paced and I couldn’t get out of the habit of mashing buttons.
However, the save system could have done better. Savings are only allowed by certain statues and can often be found in the middle of each level (the levels are quite large). When you die, that’s where you respawn. So if you get beaten by a boss, you have to start over half the level again.
It goes without saying that the game may save the karma you earned between the save point and the end of the level. But it was too inconsistent for my taste. Each time I died, I would often turn the game off instead of starting over.
Overall, the boss fights are the only thing that left an impression on me in this game. The levels were repetitive and the map system was pretty cool, but it was too big for the same gameplay to explore the entire level. Also, the same music was playing in loops in each area, so I often played my own music or played movies as background music.
I think HunterX has the potential to be a great platformer, but it didn’t do anything special for me. The lack of story description and characters left big holes, and the gameplay became boring and repetitive after a while.
